What It Proposes
Drafted by the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (headed by New York's Congressman W. Sterling Cole and his vice-chairman, Iowa's Senator Bourke Hickenlooper), the bill has two main objectives: 1) to create a private atomic-power industry, and 2) to prepare allied nations for atomic warfare and peacetime uses of atomic energy.
To end the Government's atomic monopoly, it would set up machinery for licensing companies to make electric power from atomic energy. Under the AEC's paternal eye, the companies would acquire their own reactors and other facilities, but the Government would keep title to nuclear materials which it would...